Raleigh SEO Meetup presentation on Essential SEO Tools of the Trade. No doubt you've heard us talk about Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, .htaccess files, xml sitemaps and robots.txt. This is the month we will cover all that stuff so that you will understand it and more importantly, be able to use them in a way to help your site. This isn't geeky stuff, it's essentials. If you aren't looking at the way your site is performing you are missing an easy win.

1. Essential SEO Tools of the Trade September 2011 Phil Buckley SEO – What You Need To Know Raleigh SEO Meetup Group Twitter: @1918

2. Who’s Using What This was the first Meetup where we asked questions of people who were signing up

3. Are you using Google's or Bing's Webmaster Tools? Statistics from the 110+ people who signed up to attend this specific meetup

4. Are you using Google Analytics? Statistics from the 110+ people who signed up to attend this specific meetup

5. Are you using and paid tools like Raven or SEOmoz? Statistics from the 110+ people who signed up to attend this specific meetup

6. Using All 3 vs. Using None Statistics from the 110+ people who signed up to attend this specific meetup

7. Step #1

8. Search Queries

9. Google +1 Metrics

10. Googlebot Crawl Errors

11. Who is linking to the 404 This icon takes you to the page which is linking back to your site

12. Fetch as Googlebot You can enter a new url here Once retrieved, you can see the code Google sees when it requests you page

13. Why Fetch as Googlebot? This isn’t good Only Googlebot sees this, normal user agents see the real page

14. Why Fetch as Googlebot?

15. Step #2

16. Daily Alerts Why the alert

17. Step #3

18. Step #4

19. seobook

20. Raven SEO Tools

21. Check your Head

23. Error page

24. Password protection

25. File listing

26. Hotlinking

28. Robots.txt By default search engines are greedy. They want to index as much high quality information as they can, and they will assume that they can crawl everything unless you tell them otherwise. Allow indexing of everything User-agent: *Disallow: Disallow indexing of everything User-agent: *Disallow: /

29. Specific Bots You can specific rules for specific spiders has the best page on the entire web about robots.txt at http://tools.seobook.com/robots-txt/

30. Sitemaps “Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover. In its simplest terms, a XML Sitemap—usually called Sitemap, with a capital S—is a list of the pages on your website. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google's normal crawling process.” – Google

31. Sitemaps “Google doesn't guarantee that we'll crawl or index all of your URLs. However, we use the data in your Sitemap to learn about your site's structure, which will allow us to improve our crawler schedule and do a better job crawling your site in the future. In most cases, webmasters will benefit from Sitemap submission, and in no case will you be penalized for it.” – Google

32. XML or HTML Sitemaps?

33. F.A.Q. Do I have to spend money to rank? No. Would my time be better spent doing other SEO tasks? Probably not. Are the Boston Red Sox going to make it to the playoffs this year? Reply hazy, try again

34. Thank You Special thanks to our sponsors: Coalmarch Productions for keeping this meetup FREE! Thee Design Studio for providing the pizza! and for letting us use their cool space